This is an ethnographic work written by a Swedish anthropologist
who has lived in Cairo, Egypt for several years curating the cultural tropes
that are woven into the lives of her traditional Egyptian subjects. Malmström
sets the scene for her work by describing a 1994 incident wherein CNN broadcast
live the female genital cutting of a young girl in Egypt. A secret practice
made public, Malmström uses this event to springboard her commentary on how
female genital cutting is practiced, experienced, and viewed among Egyptians.

Female genital cutting is defined as the partial or total
removal of external female genitalia for non-medical (i.e. cultural) reasons.
This is largely a practice carried out in Africa and some parts of the Middle
East. Egypt has one of the highest global rates of female genital cutting, and
the cutting usually occurs at the age of 9 years. Many reasons are cited for
the cutting, and in Egypt it is done to decrease a woman’s sex drive as well as
to fit the standards of beauty (i.e. labia minora are considered unattractive).
It had usually been performed by a traditional practitioner, but more recently,
this human rights violation has been medicalized in Egypt and is often
performed by doctors in an operating room using anesthesia. Even though Egyptian
law and Muslim as well as Coptic Christian clerics have issued bans on female
genital cutting, the practice continues in secrecy.

Malmström starts her book by saying that female genital
cutting may actually be carried out in large part as Egyptian political protest
against the West. She uses excerpts from interviews with women of different
generations, social strata, and degree of devotion to Islam to describe their
different experiences and opinions on topics that center around womanhood and
the many components of womanhood in Egypt.
While the title suggests that Malmström will tackle female
genital cutting head-on throughout this
piece, she actually takes a more circuitous route. She spends several chapters
describing other woman-centric issues to familiarize the reader with Egyptian
culture. For instance, Malmström describes how sexuality is expected to be
expressed at different points in life: in girlhood, adolescence, and after
marriage. She focuses on how Egyptian women are expected to straddle many
expectations regarding sexuality depending on the context: sexually receptive
to the husband only, for instance, but not so much so that the husband struggles
to satisfy her.
One of the most telling quotes regarding the meaning of
womanhood is,

“A woman should always be soft
towards a man...She should never accuse her husband of anything or argue with
him. A woman should be strong and never show her true feelings. A woman must be
beautiful. A woman will win through beauty, softness, and through cooking....A
woman should not show her sadness because of him [her husband], since she turns
ugly, loses her health and eventually, her husband. She should be even softer
towards him and give him everything in life” (p. 169).

Malmström delves into the centrality of cooking, pain, and
endurance of suffering in the lives of traditional women and how these items,
as well as being “cut” are seen as necessary to the satisfactory construction
of Egyptian female identity. This exploration of many parts of womanhood in
Egypt allows the reader to attempt to engage in a nuanced understanding of
female genital cutting in the context of a broader, textured Egyptian culture.

As the
movie opens, the married artists Einar and Gerda Wegener are working out of
their apartment in Copenhagen. The year is around 1908 and they have been married
for just a few years. They do not have children as yet, but they have hopes
that they would soon.

Einar
is a painter of Scandinavian landscapes and Gerda is a figurative painter. When
the model for a painting Gerda is working on fails to appear one day, she asks
Einar to take the model’s place. Einar would need to pose with the model’s
dress and assume a feminine posture. In posing as a woman, Einar's simmering desire to become a woman comes to a boil.

At
first Gerda finds Einar’s interest in posing as a woman an interesting
diversion and as a means to have some fun at various social events. But, Einar becomes more and more serious about his interest in transitioning to a
woman in more than just wardrobe and affect. As an early step in that
direction, he takes on the name Lili Elbe and the pronoun "she." She gives up
painting and becomes Gerda’s primary model. Gerda’s
paintings become highly sought after with her new model.
Lili’s quest to become a woman intensified
over the subsequent years and extended to hoping to acquire a uterus so
that she could give birth. With Gerda’s help, Lili eventually finds a surgeon
in Germany who is willing to perform a series of risky procedures that will
make her into a woman. After the operations, Lili was
transformed into the woman she wanted to be, but without the availability of
anti-rejection drugs and antibiotics, she died in the hospital with Gerda at
her side.

A woman stands nude with her back to the viewer. Her arms
are raised, hands interlaced behind her neck. Her back is deformed and scarred,
but her body, depicted in warm flesh tones, looks solid and capable. She stands
uncomfortably but patiently, as if she is waiting for a medical exam in a
doctor’s office, or as if she is inviting the audience to look and learn.

A skeleton is superimposed anatomically over the lower half
of the woman’s body, including her lower spine, pelvis, and femurs. A round
form surrounds the lower spine which looks abnormal. In the blue background is
a skeleton of a horse. The horse is angled away from the audience, such that we
see its rear and tail most prominently. But its head is turned to look
backwards, so that its empty eye sockets appear to be peering at the woman and
at the audience.

This book represents the 1915 American edition of Brooke's collected poems and is introduced by George Edward Woodberry, an American critic of poetry. A table of contents of titles follows the introduction. Ninety-four poems - all rhymed and almost all of them formal - are thematically arranged on 163 pages.

Thirty six are sonnets. Most of the poems are brief, under two pages in length, and deal with love or ardor (59), death or aging (43), or various combinations of love/ardor and death/aging (33). Only three treat subjects one could call primarily medical or related to medicine: "Thoughts on the Shape of the Human Body" (p. 59), "Paralysis" (p.73) and "Channel Passage" ( p. 90). However, the threads of death, aging, the limitations of one's physicality and loneliness - no strangers to medical humanities courses - are ubiquitous.

His famous sonnet sequence of five poems composed while a soldier in WWI occurs halfway through the book under the grouping "1914." Following the poems is a biographical note by poet Margaret Lavington. There is a photogravure frontispiece dated 1914 with a reproduction of the poet's autograph beneath. The book has no index.

This is a
collection of essays by (mostly British) artists, performers, and academics on
the intersection between medicine and theater.
It appears in a series entitled “Performance and Science: Interdisciplinary
Dialogues” put out by Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. The
introduction makes it clear there are many points of convergence beyond the
scope of this volume, such as how medicine is depicted in plays and therapeutic
uses of theater (e.g. drama therapy). The focus
here, then, is on “the ways in which the body is understood, displayed and
represented in performance” (p. 11). And
the “medical body” of the title refers to one that is ’acted upon’ by illness
or disability and/or by the diagnostic and therapeutic activities of the
medical profession” (Ibid).

The book is divided into three sections: “Performing the
Medical,” “Performing Patients,” and “Performing Body Parts.” The first section includes an essay by Roger
Kneebone, a surgeon, who explores the parallels between his field and theatrical
performance. Kneebone has devised simulations
that enable laypersons to get a sense of what it is like to participate in
surgery. In his view, this encourages cross-fertilization
of ideas. For example, his collaboration
with a jazz pianist has demonstrated to him that musical improvisation, in its
spontaneity, is somewhat like emergency surgery. And his work with a choreographer led to the
development of a dance piece depicting the movements of a surgical team during
a procedure.

In the second section we read about Brian Lobel, a theater
artist who has used his experience with testicular cancer to create a solo performance
piece entitled “BALL.” This not only allowed
Lobel to “regain a sense of mastery over the illness experience” (p. 88), but
has also earned him a niche within the theater community. Lobel now works with other cancer sufferers
helping them develop their own narratives in a project called “Fun with Cancer
Patients.”

The final section of the book includes a description of “Under
Glass,” a forty-minute performance piece consisting of eight specimen jars each
containing a solo performer, said to be “at once museum exhibit, gallery and
medical laboratory” (p. 141), which also provides the book's front cover image. "Under Glass" was devised by Clod Ensemble, whose Performing Medicine
project is known for its teaching programs in numerous London medical schools. Meant to provoke discourse about the public
display of specimens, it brings to mind the Victorian “freak show” as
well as the more recent controversial touring Body Worlds exhibition of
plastinated cadavers and body parts.

At 16, Alice is diagnosed with leukemia, and is given a dire prognosis. Assuming she has months to live, she undergoes chemotherapy with the support of her lifelong friend, Harvey, whose frank and deepening love she is uncertain about returning. On days when she has enough energy and the nausea abates, she works on a "bucket list" with Harvey's sometimes reluctant help, since the list includes revenge on two classmates who have hurt and humiliated her. When, months into treatment, she goes into unexpected full remission, Alice has to come to terms with the consequences of some of her revenge strategies and reassess the depth of a relationship with Harvey that may last far longer than she thought she had. Given an opportunity to choose life on new terms, she considers those new terms in a more adult way, chastened, focused, and grateful for a chance to make new choices.

Many are familiar with these stories from the author's practice as a midwife among the urban poor in London's East End in the 1950s. Each piece stands alone as a story about a particular case. Many of them are rich with the drama of emergency interventions, birth in complicated families (most of them poor), home births in squalid conditions, and the efforts of midwives to improve public health services, sanitation, and pre- and post-natal care with limited resources in a city decimated by wartime bombings. As a gallery of the different types of women in the Anglican religious order that housed the midwives and administered their services, and the different types of women who lived, survived, and even thrived in the most depressing part of London, the book provides a fascinating angle on social and medical history and women's studies.

The physician-narrator is looking in on a 30 year old
patient named Ricky. Readers immediately
learn that the patient has cerebral palsy:
his ear mashed flat, his neck contorted into a tight C, almost
quadriplegic. These first stanza clinical
observations are indisputable. The
narrator then shifts from the medical facts to more subjective thoughts ranging
from Ricky’s previous treatment responses and medications to Ricky’s adult heterosexual
response to the proximity of a female, and finally to the narrator’s own wishes
for this patient. Ricky’s parents, the narrator notes, have similarly
but uncomfortably witnessed their son’s ogling response to a pretty nurse or
doctor or a provocative adult television
image. The parents’ response, he notes, to these observations has been to redirect Ricky’s
focus by switching the channel to Nickelodeon, a program geared towards
children.
Not unlike situations in several writings by William Carlos
Williams, this physician has moved from objective medical information to his
own interior thoughts about Ricky’s circumstances and confinement. Rather than sticking with the facts associated
with the patient’s medical condition, he wonders, imagines, and expresses in
this poem seemingly un-doctorly thoughts.

After
eleven minutes underwater at near-freezing temperature, Delaney Maxwell, who
appeared dead upon rescue, is revived.
Unlikely as her survival seems, the return of apparently normal brain
function seems even more unlikely, yet after a few days she is allowed to go
home with medications and resume a near-normal life. But after-effects of her trauma linger, the
most dramatic of which is that she develops a sixth sense about impending
death. She hides this recurrent
sensation from her parents, and from her best friend, Decker, who rescued her,
but finds that she shares the experience with a hospital aide who, like her,
suffered a coma after a car accident that killed his family members. Like her, he senses death in others. Gradually
Delaney realizes that “normal” isn’t a place she’s likely to return to, and
that Troy, the aide whose life has been a kind of “hell” since his own trauma,
is even further from normal than she.
Troy seems to feel that it is his mission to help hasten death for those
who are dying, to prevent prolonged suffering.
The story follows her efforts to stop him, and to communicate with close
friends, especially Decker, in spite of the
secret she carries about her own altered awareness. When her
efforts to save a friend who is dying of a seizure fail, Delaney faces another
moment of crisis, compounded by Troy’s own suicidal desire to end his own
suffering and hers with it. In the midst
of these new traumas a clarity she has lost about what it means to choose life
returns to her, and with it the possibility of a loving openness with parents and
friends about the mysteries of her own brain and heart.

Two individuals share a struggle that is
grueling, depressing, and whose outcome is probably preordained. The Mother
(divorced, constantly tired, and fearful of sickness) is "not a good
choice for the parent of a chronic invalid" (p. 168). The Son (smallish,
clever, and born with some kind of tumor) has previously had an organ
transplant (most likely kidney).

Their trek through the realm of sickness unfurls in seven scenes - all hospital
wards and finally Hospice. First, the Son is an adolescent in a pediatric ward
where the Machine (presumably renal dialysis) prevents his death. There he
spots a baby that he dubs a "Not-Dead." She has multiple birth
defects due to a chromosomal abnormality and is kept alive by technology. He
intuits that while not dead, the baby is not "properly alive" either.
He muses about his own status. His mother is always bedside, propping up his
spirits.

Next he is in the ICU and then transferred to a medical floor. He receives a
blood transfusion after disconnecting the Machine in a likely suicide attempt.
Sometime later, he is back in the pediatric ward after receiving an organ
transplant. The Son gets admitted to the Cardio-Respiratory unit for a severe infection.
In and out of hospitals, he enrolls in college but quits. After getting married,
he joins a commune of survivors of medical illnesses known as "The
Saved." This collective lives on a farm and members avoid any contact with family.

The Son's health further deteriorates. He is hospitalized in terminal
condition. By this time, he has his own child, a 14-month-old boy named
Jaybird. In the oncology ward, doctors diagnose three tumors in the Son's brain
but he refuses any treatment (surgery, radiation, or chemotherapy). He is moved
to Hospice. His absent Father comes to visit and comfort him. When the Son
dies, it is the Mother who is alone with him. The Son's wife, Father, Jaybird,
and members of The Saved commune are all asleep in the Day Room. Only after the
Son dies are the names of the Mother and the Son revealed: Julia and Jonathon.